(BearManor Media, 324 pages, $24.95)
By Micky Moore
You want an epic life story? Try Micky Moore’s near century of activity in the movie business, first as a child star at the height of the silent era, then 20 years later as an in-demand AD and second unit director for a list of auteurs—from DeMille, George Cukor and John Sturges to Spielberg—that it fairly boggles the mind.
He started as a child actor in early Hollywood, with co-stars such as Gloria Swanson, but adult success in acting eluded him. No matter, his second act was a doozy. Moore was an AD on the 1956 The Ten Commandments after having played one of Pharaoh’s sons in the 1923 version. He relates tales of working in vivid locations alongside some of the hottest tempers and biggest egos in the business. He worked alongside John Wayne, Hal Wallis, and Paul Newman, and did exemplary second-unit work on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Patton, and Lust for Glory (a worthy compensation, he says, for not having been called up in World War II) and, as a second unit director, helped put together the famous truck-dragging sequence on Raiders of the Lost Ark.
In a career spanning the growth, high tide and long decline of the studio system and extending deep into the 1990s, Moore seemingly managed to live half a dozen different lives, and he remembers every detail of them richly and clearly.
Review written by John Patterson.